LA CROSSE, Wis. — Donald Trump is scheduled to campaign Thursday in La Crosse as the former president ramps up battleground state travel heading into the traditional Labor Day turn toward the fall election.
Trump’s intense focus on recapturing states he won in 2016 but lost narrowly in 2020 continues with stops in the middle of Michigan and western Wisconsin.
The visits come as Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are sitting down for their first major television interview of their presidential campaign as the duo travels in southeast Georgia on a bus tour.
Trump’s day started with an afternoon rally in Potterville, Michigan, near the state capital of Lansing. Trump won Eaton County, where part of Lansing is located, in both 2016 and 2020, but by a smaller margin the second time. It was his third visit to the state in the past nine days and second this week after a speech to the National Guard Association in Detroit on Monday.
Thursday night, he will visit La Crosse, Wisconsin, for a town hall moderated by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who endorsed him in Detroit. It will be Trump's first visit to Wisconsin since the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which ended three days before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and made way for Harris.
Along with Pennsylvania, which Trump will visit on Friday, these three Midwestern states make up a northern industrial bloc Democrats carried for two decades before Trump won them in 2016. Biden recaptured them on his way to the White House in 2020.
Trump and his vice-presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have blitzed the battleground states in recent weeks, with Vance in both states this week as well.
Trump's campaign is facing ongoing questions following a visit to Arlington Cemetery earlier this week. An Army spokesman said Thursday an Arlington National Cemetery official was “abruptly pushed aside” in an altercation with Trump’s staff during a wreath-laying ceremony to honor service members killed in the Afghanistan War withdrawal.
Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung said the team had gotten permission for a photographer to attend that portion of the visit and disparaged the cemetery official as having clearly been “suffering from a mental health episode.”
Trump has struggled in recent weeks to pivot to his new race against Harris, who has reinvigorated the Democratic Party.
Harris and Walz are aiming to leverage the surge in enthusiasm among the party’s base since her campaign launch just over a month ago. They hope this excitement — which was on full display at last week's convention in Chicago — will extend to more moderate areas as they embark on a two-day bus tour in Georgia, including events in the state’s rural southern regions.
Trump's events in Michigan and Wisconsin are both in swing congressional districts. La Crosse is a hub within Wisconsin's 3rd Congressional District, where Republican Derrick Van Orden won narrowly in 2022. Democrat Rebecca Cooke won the Aug. 13 primary to face him in November.